From the March 2016 Issue: Virginia On the Verge

This article appears in the March issue of Inside Lacrosse Magazine. Purchase a copy in print or digitally, written prior to the Cavaliers' 3-3 start to the 2016 season. They head to Ithaca Saturday to take on the 1-2 Big Red before continuing ACC play vs. Notre Dame on March 19.

(Photos by Matt Riley unless otherwise noted)

The Virginia men’s lacrosse team met in early September to begin preparations for the 2016 season. The team’s main goal — to win a national championship — is no different from its predecessors, according to those inside the program. It’s a goal Virginia has met four times under coach Dom Starsia, most recently in 2011. But this Virginia team launched its season in a different landscape from its immediate predecessors. The Cavaliers haven’t won an NCAA Tournament game since the First Round in 2012. Nor has Virginia found much solace during the regular season. In the past three years, the Cavaliers have lost 11 of 12 ACC games. Moreover, its place atop the ACC unquestionably has been taken by Duke and arguably has been usurped by Notre Dame, as well. The Cavaliers enter this season having last been ranked No. 1 on April 4, 2012. It is a drought that is approaching the program’s longest in 16 years.

There also appear to be at least minor fissures to navigate on the school’s pristine campus, affectionately known as “The Grounds”: In 2013, for the first time, the average attendance at Virginia home baseball games exceeded the average home lacrosse attendance. That trend extended into 2014 and last year.

Every major lacrosse program goes through droughts. It’s a litany even casual fans can recite: Maryland last won a national title in 1975. North Carolina hasn’t reached the Final Four since 1993 (coincidentally, that’s the year Starsia arrived at Virginia). Johns Hopkins went 18 seasons, from 1987 to 2005, without an NCAA title. Princeton hasn’t reached the Final Four since 2004. By those standards, Virginia’s three years without an NCAA Tournament win is minor. Yet Virginia’s standing nationally and in the ACC — and possibly on its own campus — add up to this season being a seminal one.

“I’m careful not to say we just haven’t achieved,” Starsia says. “Our [2015] team way surpassed my expectations overall. … I feel like things are on track, and we’ve been a little snakebit. But I also know there is a scoreboard out there, and we are accountable for that.”

There are reasons for optimism, reasons to believe the previous three years are a blip and normal service will resume.

The Cavaliers have six starters back from the team that went 10-5 and reached the NCAA Tournament last year. Also back is junior Tanner Scales, arguably the team’s best defender, who missed last season with an ankle injury. Senior attackman/midfielder Greg Coholan was the No. 6 overall pick in the MLL draft after putting up 53 points last season. Junior Matt Barrett is a returning second-team All-American. Joining Scales on defense are two sophomores who will benefit from having started last year. Starsia believes Virginia’s shortstick defensive midfield is the deepest he’s ever had. The freshman class includes midfielder Ryan Conrad, the No. 1-ranked prospect by Inside Lacrosse.

The future looks bright as well: The Cavaliers landed commitments from the players ranked No. 1 by IL in the 2017 and 2018 classes. Like Conrad, both are midfielders, meaning in the not-too-distant future Virginia might have a midfield of three No. 1 recruits.

Lastly, the ACC will look different from recent years and may do so to Virginia’s benefit. For once, the Cavaliers will have experience while Syracuse and North Carolina must replace senior-heavy offenses from 2015.

If preseason conditioning is any indication, Virginia will be in for a good year. Coholan says the regimen has been the most strenuous and competitive in his time on the team. “Guys were regularly finishing and then grabbing a trash can” to be sick, he says.

“We’re all really optimistic,” says Scales. “Last year, we were really young in a lot of areas. This year we’re going to be a lot deeper all over the field. … It’s tough in the ACC to play without as much depth as the other teams.”

Photo by Jaclyn Borowski

From ‘Ace’ to No. 1

Virginia lacrosse was much further down the food chain when Starsia was hired from Brown after the 1992 season. Previous coach Jim “Ace” Adams was in the unique position of having been inducted into the sport’s Hall of Fame before he had coached a game at Virginia. (He landed in the Hall of Fame in 1975 on the strength of coaching Army to four national titles.) Adams arrived at Virginia in 1978. He was charged with, among other initiatives, winning the program’s first national title since 1972. The Cavaliers advanced to the title game twice in his tenure — in 1980 and 1986. They lost both in sudden-death overtime. In 1988, the Cavaliers upset Johns Hopkins in an NCAA Quarterfinal to reach the Final Four in Syracuse, N.Y. It was Adams’ last NCAA Tournament win. After the 1992 season, Adams retired. His final teams were widely considered to have talented rosters but ultimately were labeled as underachievers.

Starsia arrived from Brown for the 1993 season and among the dictates from the university’s administration was, in his words, “to win championships.” In his first year, Starsia guided the Cavaliers to the NCAA Tournament Quarterfinals. There, they led Johns Hopkins by three goals entering the fourth quarter. They didn’t score again. The Blue Jays finished on a 7-0 run to win, 14-10. In postgame interviews, the Johns Hopkins players were asked if they were nervous trailing by three in the fourth quarter. Attackman Brian Piccola answered. “We knew if we started our offense and we scored maybe two or three goals that they would start to doubt themselves,” Piccola said. “Because … that’s been their past history.”

By 1994, however, Starsia was starting to develop a team for which Virginia administrators and fans had been longing. The Cavaliers were becoming regulars in the NCAA Tournament and, thanks to a coaching staff that included current Virginia assistant Marc Van Arsdale and current Penn coach Mike Murphy, began to leave the other ACC programs and Johns Hopkins behind. The Cavaliers reached the NCAA title game in 1994 and 1996, losing both in sudden-death overtime.

The expectations in 1999, Starsia’s seventh season at Virginia, were not overly optimistic. Virginia began ranked No. 6 and settled on a starting a freshman in goal. He finished with a save percentage under 50%, but, thanks to the leadership of captains Tucker Radebaugh and Jamie Leachman, the Cavaliers enacted a strict regimen that greatly curtailed off-field social activities. Players enforced the standard themselves. According to a Washington Post story in May 1999, not one player ran afoul of the rule.

“We are much more focused now than we have been in the past,” Radebaugh told the Post in 99. “Before, guys would leave practice and think about where they wanted to go party. Now, we leave practice and think about the next practice or next game. I think it’s pretty amazing that [Virginia’s 42 players] can agree on something and make it work.”

Make it work was an understatement — the Cavaliers ended a 27-year drought by winning the national title that year. Titles followed in 2003, 2006 and 2011. In an interview in late January, Starsia still talks glowingly of Radebaugh and the 1999 senior class.

“One player fully committed can lift a team,” Starsia says. “The reverse is also true. … In 1999, I had been here seven years and had not won a championship. I had to find a way to get over the hump. We had been close so many times. Tucker’s class wasn’t the most talented class on that team. The junior class was. But Tucker just decided he was all-in as a senior. He grabbed the team and didn’t let go.”

Starsia discovered winning a national title is a combination of luck, health, leadership, talent and preparation. At least a couple of those caveats have deserted the program recently.

In 2013, starting goalie Austin Geisler surprisingly transferred after the fall. That same year midfielder Chris LaPierre, the team’s lone captain — one of the few times Virginia has had only one captain — suffered an injury in the preseason and missed the year. The 2014 team had to replace several starters who graduated and it met the predictions for a subpar season. In 2015, the Cavaliers lost two starters to injury and a third left school and transferred to Maryland.

The team’s record in those three years — 27-19 — is almost identical to the final three years of Adams’s tenure (26-14). Starsia believes that last year’s team, with three first-year starters on defense, did well to clinch a top-eight seed in the NCAA Tournament. Among the evidence that Virginia had a strong season: the Cavs won all four of their one-goal games.

But for Starsia and his staff, which still includes Van Arsdale running the offense and defensive coordinator Joe Starsia, Dom's son who’s entering his third season, that close game record wasn't a replacement for an NCAA Tournament win nor a much-longed-for victory over Duke, their recent nemesis.

‘A second father’

The recent struggles on the field are minor in comparison to events a few years previous.

In 2010, Virginia women’s lacrosse player Yeardley Love was murdered in her Charlottesville apartment; she was 22. Men’s player George Huguely was convicted of her death and is serving a prison sentence of 23 years. In the wake of Love’s murder, uncomfortable questions abounded. It was revealed eight men’s lacrosse players — including Huguely — had been arrested for alcohol-related incidents (two were found not guilty).

The following year, the Cavaliers won the national title despite having dismissed All-American starting midfielders Rhamel and Shamel Bratton toward the end of the regular season.

The lessons, and sadness, from those seasons still resonate.

“Our team is better behaved in many ways,” Starsia says. “We’re more mindful of issues overall and there’s greater accountability and scrutiny for the program. I accept that. … We’re talking about things that we want to limit under any circumstances anyway. It’s areas we have to be very mindful of.”

Especially after 2010, there were questions about how long Starsia should remain in his job — or even if he should remain. The university made its position clear: In Jan. 2012, it gave Starsia a five-year contract extension that included a raise.

And in the coaching community, questions about whether Starsia would retire after 2010, riding into the sunset in 2011 or in the wake of a talented senior class in 2012, existed but were not terribly common, according to two coaches interviewed for this story.

“Other people were talking about” whether Starsia would retire, says Brown coach Lars Tiffany, who played for Starsia at Brown. “But the people talking about it aren’t the ones who are important to Dom. Those people important to Dom weren’t talking about it, and I don’t think he was thinking about it.”

Says Syracuse coach John Desko, the coach whom Starsia bested to win his first NCAA title: “I consider Dom a good friend. We spent some time together on the [NCAA] Rules Committee and spent some time socially and out recruiting. Naturally we talk quite a bit. … And he never once mentioned [retiring] to me. For me, I wasn’t even thinking about it. It never crossed my mind. When you’re as successful as Dom and you’re still having fun, why would you retire?”

Starsia will turn 64 during the season. He says lacrosse is still fun for him, as is recruiting and being around the players at practice and even during conditioning work. Those close to Starsia and inside the program appear glad he has stuck around.

“In a lot of ways, he’s become almost a second father to me,” Scales says. “He’s someone who is influencing me today and tomorrow and probably will continue to do so 50 years down the road.”

Says Tiffany: “If I had a son being recruited today, I don’t care if Dom is at Virginia or Virginia Tech or a school in southwestern Virginia with a Division III program, I would want my son to play for Dom Starsia. Because he would be loved, he would be motivated and he would be treated like a man.”

Closer to home

Virginia will face challenges in 2016 in its attempt to return to the sport’s pinnacle and the top of its conference. It is possible another challenge will come closer to home.

The lacrosse team was once the shining star of Virginia’s athletic programs. Its national title runs in 1999 and 2003 drew wide acclaim in Charlottesville; newspaper articles from the men’s and women’s lacrosse championships were spotted in the windows of stores in the downtown area.

But the recent picture for men’s lacrosse on campus has become murky. In 2002, Virginia’s lacrosse average home attendance was plus-1393 over baseball’s home average. It reached plus-1440 in 2008. The numbers last year were almost completely reversed: Lacrosse was minus-1,438.

The earlier start to lacrosse season sport-wide can lead to a visibility problem, especially at Virginia, given that the school’s resurgent basketball program is reaching the crucial part of its season when lacrosse plays its first games. Certainly Virginia’s lacrosse scheduling has not helped attendance; this year, thanks in part to television requests, the Cavaliers will only play one Saturday home game. (Though Starsia is quick to add he is pleased to have so many of his team’s games available on television.)

Whether the baseball/lacrosse conundrum even matters is another question. Starsia says he doesn’t think the baseball team’s success is an impact on lacrosse. “I don’t see any reason why baseball being good should complicate my life,” Starsia says.

The current Virginia players are doing their part around the campus. They volunteer in several endeavors, particularly a flag football tournament in honor of Will Barrow, a co-captain on the 2008 team who died a few months after the season. The tournament, which just finished its seventh year, has grown to feature teams from around the country. The tournament raises money for the UVA Helpline, an anonymous and confidential telephone service assisting the Charlottesville community in suicide awareness and prevention.

“We definitely see ourselves as trying to be leaders among our peers and in the community,” Scales says.

Overall, a strong finish this spring would no doubt diminish the questions about the program and the hand-wringing of the past three seasons.

“We think we’re on the verge of something special,” Coholan says.

And Virginia’s coach will rely on a familiar formula to try and deliver results in 2016.

“At the end of the day, the commitment of the kids is what I think generally ultimately determines these things. My job is to convince them it’s worth it,” Starsia says. “If we have guys listening and buying in, then I know we have chance. … The players are aware enough that we want to make more of a ripple at the end of the year. Everyone knows it and everyone is doing what they can toward that end.”

This article appears in the March issue of Inside Lacrosse Magazine. Purchase a copy in print or digitally.